Sailor lived colorful life

Robert R. Kinderman knew he was a lucky man. Although he managed to crawl out of his overturned ship as a hornet’s nest of Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor, many of his shipmates could not. The USS Oklahoma capsized 12 minutes after the first of nine torpedoes slammed into the battleship on Dec. 7, 1941, taking the lives of 429 men, the loss of life second only to the USS Arizona’s 1,177 victims.

Born on New Year’s Day 1919, Kinderman helped build roads in northern Wisconsin for the CCC during the Depression before enlisting in the Navy in 1939 to see the world. After World War II, he returned to his hometown of Oshkosh and worked for Rockwell as a toolmaker. In 1951, he married and raised two sons and a daughter. When his wife was pregnant with their daughter in 1953, he was recalled to active duty in the Korean War. He built a home on Lake Winnebago where his widow, now 89, still lives.

He and his son, Robert J. Kinderman, almost died in an ice boating accident on Lake Winnebago in the early 1980s.

Many USS Oklahoma sailors remained entombed in the ship for two years until the ship was salvaged and the bodies — most declared unidentifiable — were buried in graves marked “unknown” at the large military cemetery on Oahu known as the Punchbowl. In recent years, new technology has identified many of the remains and returned USS Oklahoma sailors to their families for burial, including several from Wisconsin.

Kinderman didn’t return to Hawaii until the 50th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor invasion, proudly marching in a parade, greeting other Pearl Harbor survivors and visiting the Punchbowl. Several years later when his son saw the movie “Saving Private Ryan,” he was struck by the scene at the beginning of the film of an old man walking with his family among the graves of those who didn’t return home from World War II.

Robert J. Kinderman remembered watching his father and one of his father’s shipmates walk among the graves of their buddies from the USS Oklahoma.

“At that time there were all these unknown graves,” Robert J. Kinderman said in a phone interview Wednesday. “My dad was a tough guy. It’s not like he’s going to break down and sob, but as his son, I could see the pain coming through.”

Kinderman died in 1999 in Oshkosh. He was 80.